CALL FOR COUNTYWIDE VOTE FROM CHARGERS COUNSEL

All the stadium stories you missed since my last roundup while you were discussing whether the Chargers really stole the Giants blind in the 2004 draft.

Last Tuesday, I explored the Port of San Diego’s finances, noting that “whether the terminal is a vital economic engine or something less is a key component of a renewed debate on how to use 96 waterfront acres to best benefit the region.”

You’ll remember, as I wrote in the same story, that “the owners and editorial board of U-T San Diego are proposing a new sports and entertainment complex there, while still respecting maritime uses for some period.”

Then, I attended the San Diego Association of Governments’ annual retreat, where over dinner, in some of his strongest words yet, Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani advocated for a countywide stadium vote and said a vote would slip to 2013, when, notably, San Diego will have a new mayor.

Speaking of a new mayor, San Diego’s four high-profile mayoral candidates weighed in on the U-T ownership’s stadium plan in the newspaper on Super Bowl Sunday.

But the big game was the focus of the week’s football conversation.

We found out that the man in charge of feeding 70,000 fans at the game was from Escondido, and we also found out that Roger Goodell wants 34 teams in the league via expansion when at least one returns to Los Angeles.

Or does he? He seemed to backpedal on the comment Friday, saying expansion is not a topic of discussion right now.

“So where does that leave Los Angeles?” Bonsignore wrote. “Very much in the picture, believe it or not.”

Forbes’ Mike Ozanian did the math. If the league were to expand by two teams, its owners would likely split a cool couple billion dollars.

Speaking of counting cash, Bloomberg’s editors have something for those who wondered leading up to the Super Bowl whether a stadium is an economic boon.

The answer: It isn’t. A Bloomberg report uses more words to make that argument and to suggest there is another reason to build such venues: love of the game.

Over at the North County Times, we got a nice breakdown on why San Diego won’t host another Super Bowl until it builds a stadium. “We were sold a bum bill of goods,” columnist Jay Paris wrote.

In Qualcomm Stadium news, a man who was booted from a 2010 Chargers game filed a lawsuit to uphold his right to curse at Chargers games. “A fan has a right to say ‘[expletive] you’ in public,” his attorney said told a reporter. “It’s a public place.”

The man said he was being cursed out the entire game and didn’t respond until two fans approached him and challenged him to a fight.

In Los Angeles, new renderings of what an expanded convention center would look like were unveiled Thursday. Dakota Smith of the Los Angeles Daily News called it a “dramatic refashioning of the city-owned Convention Center” and mentioned how the new setting would now boast contiguous space instead of separate buildings. Hmmm … Where have we heard a debate over those two approaches before?